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'Clearly Something Is Happening Here'

by Rob Sandelin

THE FLIERS AT THE CO-OP, THE BOOKSTORE, and at the deli had brought a group of people together at the library meeting room to learn about and possibly help create a cohousing neighborhood. It was a mixed crowd: two single moms, a computer programmer and his family, a lawyer and his partner, two retired couples, a Unitarian minister, and a half dozen of her congregation.

At this first meeting, they learned that cohousing is a cooperative neighborhood designed by the future residents. The homes are privately owned and a central community building-the common house-provides community space for activities such as meals, childcare, meetings, parties, children's play, workshop projects, and whatever other shared activities the residents want to organize. The slide show depicted people gathered together at community meals, children of different ages playing, adults in small groups sitting in common areas chatting. The slides showed wonderful common houses with well-designed kitchens, dining areas, children's play areas, bulletin boards for neighborhood notices. It was inspiring to realize that people working together had created such places. After the meeting many of the people were so excited that conversations continued spontaneously in the parking lot.

From this meeting would come many others, stretching over four years. Those that became involved would embark on a journey of community building and real estate development that none of them could have foreseen. They traveled the mazes of land-use regulation, learned the skills of collaboration, hired engineering, design, and construction professionals, surmounted legal mountains, scaled the sharp rocks of financing. They learned the skills of group decision making, effective communication, cooperative problem solving, and conflict resolution. Some of the travelers lost faith along the way and were replaced by other pioneers, eager and enthusiastic to embrace a more cooperative lifestyle.

Almost four years to the day of that first meeting, a group of 50 people stood in a large circle holding candles, to welcome, celebrate, and honor their achievement: a brand-new 30-unit cohousing neighborhood with a large central common house, garden, and playground. Only two of the original founding members from that first meeting at the library were still involved. These were the "burning souls" who at times had felt as if they carried this whole project on their backs. They refused to give up in the face of daunting hurdles such as unpleasant rezoning hearings, uncooperative bankers, and skeptical city planners. They had summoned strengths and resilience they hadn't known they had to carry into reality the vision they saw at the first meeting at the library.

While these folks had used the Total Build Out model, where all the homes are newly built at the same time, other options exist: the Retrofit model, where the group buys and renovates property with existing buildings, or slowly buys up houses on an existing street or block; and the Lot Development model, where individual homes are sold to members and built over time as each future resident is able. McCamant and Durrett's 1988 Cohousing book clearly inspired the first wave of all three models of cohousing in North America, including Muir Commons in California, Pioneer Valley and Pine Street in Massachusetts, Window in Washington, and Nyland in Colorado (Total Build Out model); Doyle Street and N Street in California and Monterey in Minnesota (Retrofit model); and Sharingwood and Talking Circle in Washington (Lot Development model). These early 1991-93 communities pioneered the cohousing development process in North America and created examples for others to follow.

ALMOST ANY DAY OF ANY WEEK, A COHOUSING MEETING is happening somewhere on the continent. Each cohousing community has its own story to share, each community a unique response to the challenges of collaborative living inside the boundaries of local development ordinances, but each neighborhood sharing some elements that define it as cohousing. Most cohousing communities are new construction, with the privately owned homes and shared community amenities such as the common house. The housing is usually clustered, both to encourage social interaction and also to preserve land. A pedestrian-centered, socially oriented design defines the cohousing architectural style, which mainstream developers are beginning to copy. Community dinners are a part of weekly life. Meetings and informal sharing of childcare are easy and natural extensions of the community intent.

The attraction of cohousing to the mainstream is obvious, and the real desire for closer ties to one's neighbors is clearly reflected in the missions and value statements of almost every cohousing group. But the notions of community and cooperation have not been an easy sell. Cohousing advocates have strained and battled against the "hippie commune" stereotype in order to secure the regulatory approvals and multimillion dollar financing packages that the 30- to 45-unit projects require. In many cases, and especially for the first wave of cohousing projects, cohousing pioneers found reluctance and resistance entrenched in building department officials, loan officers, and city bureaucrats, who found it difficult to accept that people can and do want to work and live together cooperatively. As increasing numbers of cohousing projects are built the barriers are slowly dropping.

The "We ain't no hippie commune" message that cohousers have put forth to appease suspicious bureaucrats has rubbed some longtime communitarians the wrong way, some of whom sneer at cohousing as "communities for dentists." As one participant in a recent communities gathering in the Northwest put it: "There is a class issue here, cohousing is for people with lots of money. And those of us not rich, well, we don't fit the cohousing scheme." This economic class distinction comes with home ownership, a central tenet of cohousing. Since residents are often the early developers, large outlays of money up front are needed that require economic resources that are often only available to upper-middle-class incomes. But about a sixth of the 40+ existing North American cohousing neighborhoods have succeeded in making cohousing available to lower incomes.

The majority of cohousing units are market-rate housing, which require income and employment credentials in order to secure a mortgage for a home that in many cases costs more than those in the surrounding area. Many of these new cohousing communities use the condominium-- development model (a common way to own property that provides for both private and common ownership) in order to make partnerships possible with mainstream bureaucracies. Bankers, planners, and real estate brokers can comprehend that this cohousing thing is a good risk: it has prequalified buyers and all the trappings of a regular condo development, with just a few minor differences. Although some of the early communities struggled for financing, almost none of them failed. They eventually won over a lender. This is perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of cohousing as a community form: very few fail and disband once they acquire land.

Some view cohousing as a way the middle class can experience cooperative living. Cohousing, with its private ownership, individual homes to ensure privacy, and the benefits of sharing, is luring a new group of people into community, people who would not describe themselves as communitarians at all, but who, once they experience community living, find out, much to their surprise, that they have more in common with "hippie communes" than with their suburban peers. The issues that come up in community, such as parenting in a group, cooking dinner for 40, and consensus decision making, are everyday occurrences for people living in community.

As the managerial and professional workers who make up a large percentage of cohousing members began applying their skills and techniques to promote their developing communities, their upscale marketing campaigns and media-savvy representatives pushed the concept of cohousing to the mainstream press with great success. The major daily papers, national TV news, National Public Radio, cable news, and other media conglomerates were quick to pick up this new trend, and by their coverage, created a promotional bandwagon. These stories were headlined as the "New Communities" or the "Communes of the '90s" and were almost uniformly favorable towards the concept. The first wave of finished cohousing communities were inundated by the press, local cohousing activists, and planners. Marketing the concept of cooperative housing to a wide audience is clearly a genius of cohousing.

About 50 new cohousing groups form in North America each year. More than half of these newly formed groups will disband before they ever get organized enough to buy a site. However, new forming groups are finding they have a lot of help. Some of the veterans of cohousing life have become "evangelists," consultants, and helpers for newly forming groups. Elders from the communities movement as well have provided consultation on how to make this community stuff work. For several years cohousers have corresponded with each other around the world via an email network, sharing experiences and information about all aspects of developing and living together. Every other year a national cohousing conference attracts many professionals and experienced cohousers. There are a quarterly magazine, two books on cohousing, and numerous resources on the World Wide Web. A national cohousing organization, The Cohousing Netork (www.cohousing.org), has brought together a great deal of talent, experience, and commitment to make cohousing a national movement.

A recent first cohousing meeting held in a local library here in the Pacific Northwest exceeded the capacity of the room to the point where people were standing outside on the sidewalk.

Clearly something is happening here.

Rob Sandelin, who with Michael McIntyre is Co-Guest Editor of this issue, is a longtime intentional community activist and consensus facilitator and teacher. He is a founder of the Northwest Intentional Communities Association (NICA), and author of the Intentional Community Resource Pages, a Web site on forming new communities and process issues: www.ic.org/nica/resource.php. A frequent contributor to Communities and Cohousing magazines, he is author of A Facilitators Guide to Making Consensus Work, "soon to be published on the Internet. Rob lives at Sharingwood Cohousing in Snohomish, Washington.